Michigan woman charged with abuse after 3 children left alone for years in 'revolting' squalor

DETROIT (AP) — A Michigan woman accused of leaving three children to live alone for years in a house teeming with trash and feces was charged Wednesday with child abuse, five days after police opened the door and discovered stomach-turning filth.

“These three kids were entrusted to the care of their mother … and the evidence suggests that she effectively abandoned them to a revolting pit of refuse and squalor,” said Karen McDonald, the Oakland County prosecutor in suburban Detroit.

“What stands out the most for me is, no love,” McDonald said later during a news conference. “There was nobody there to care for them.”

The 34-year-old mother was in custody and awaiting a court hearing scheduled for Thursday.

The siblings — a 15-year-old boy and two girls, ages 12 and 13 — were hiding when police entered the Pontiac home Friday after a call from the landlord, who had not been paid since October.

A sign from the City of Pontiac, Mich., is stuck to a window at 660 Lydia, along a row of homes in the 600 block of Lydia, Sunday, Feb. 16, 2025, in Pontiac, Mich., where a mother who allegedly left three of her children alone living in squalor in the home has been charged with three counts of first-degree child abuse. (Andy Morrison/Detroit News via AP)

“Police were astonished to find anyone in the location, because it appeared to be uninhabitable with piles of garbage and refuse several feet high,” McDonald said, noting that the toilet was not working.

The children were covered with feces, and the girls had trouble walking outside the home, she said. At a hospital they struggled with flushing a toilet and brushing their teeth “because they had not done it in years,” the prosecutor added.

McDonald said the children likely had been alone since 2020 or 2021, communicating with their mother only through text messages when they needed food. She was living elsewhere in Pontiac, 20 miles (about 30 kilometers) north of Detroit.